It's not so much that I have a big site, we're only talking a few hundred mailboxes here, involving three servers and possible one or two more as other "arms" of the business get involved, but it's all about geography and cost savings.
Where I'm located in the Northwest Territories (northern Canada, up by Santa's workshop) bandwidth is at a premium cost and it's not as plentiful as I'd like. We also find the responsivness of our WAN connections and stability are limited, so my mandate is keeping as much traffic off the WAN and on the local networks as possible. Updates to my LDAP databases will be so infrequent that any LDAP replication would pale in comparison to the bandwidth used in lookup of every message that passes the MTA. I know LDAP is light in that regard (hence the Lightweigh in LDAP) but I also have to consider the times that our site-to-site WAN links degrade or go down completely. It would be nice if mail operations in the local office could continue gracefully while just queueing any remote mail for when the link is back up.
Does this make sense, or am I outotlunch?
Thanks,
Andre  |